The secret is out – if you want to get noticed, your company must tap into the social media consciousness of our time.Consider the fact that we twenty- and early thirty-somethings – now an intricate part of the business and media fields – were in college when Facebook began, and we know the value of social media as if its playbook were written on our forearms. Young professionals tweet, post to walls, like, digg, bing, ping, blog, Google and forward more than anyone else, leaving the heartbeat of your news at the tips of our mouse-clicking fingers.

So how does your company tap into the ever-expanding atmosphere of social media? Is it possible to use it to your advantage within your Business Wire press release? Most certainly.

The easiest way to bridge the gap between social media and your news is to always include links to the places online where your company has a presence. In addition to including a link to your company’s home page, include the URLs to your Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages. Links provide easy access for those who receive your news to keep track of more than just your press releases – they’ll fan your Facebook page, follow your Twitter feed and subscribe to your YouTube channel to stay up on all your latest announcements.

Here are a few places where these social media links make the most sense:

as part of your boilerplate along with your company URL

in a bulleted list (i.e., “Find Us Online”) with a link to each site where your company has a media presence

One of the many great things about distributing your news through Business Wire is the “Sharing” toolbar on your press release page. To the immediate left of every press release on BusinessWire.com is a list of social media links encouraging viewers to share the press release with their own friends, fans and followers. Seize this opportunity and share your news directly with your newly acquired fan-base. It goes without saying that the people you care most about reaching are the friends of your friends, so re-post and re-tweet your release to your fans, and let them share their excitement about your news with the people they know – from there, the distance your news can travel is boundless, so give it that first little tweet and let the diggs, bings and pings fall where they may.

With 32 bureaus around the world and more newsrooms than all of our competitors combined, Business Wire is proud to provide local expertise and superior service, backed by the most accurate editors in the world. In Editor’s Corner, we ask some of our best to chime in on how to get the most out of your press release, based on their years of experience in the industry.

On August 19, Business Wire LA hosted a media breakfast and panel discussion titled “Video & SEO: Best Practices for Effective Marketing & PR” at the Olympic Collection in west Los Angeles. Our expert panel discussed the increasing popularity of online video in brand communications and shared tips with the audience of LA area communicators on how to use video to drive web traffic, generate leads and help SEO.

Hanna Pantle (far right), Assistant Vice President of Corporate Communications and Media Relations at BMI, moderated the panel, which also included (R-L):

There are two major benefits to online video: it increases engagement with the audience and it enhances the SEO of your content.

Universal search is becoming increasingly popular and represents a major opportunity when it comes to video content. Because universal search spotlights multimedia, any video you use in support of your news has a good chance of being highlighted in search because there is still not that much video content out there yet.

Although video isn’t used by all media yet, particularly print media, it can still help explain things to reporters quickly. Press releases that include video tend to have higher open rates.

Another benefit of video is its built-in social interaction. Embed codes and social media sharing links that are regularly included in online videos make them easily sharable and creates multiple posting points online, which helps SEO.

Know your audience and where they will be. You can’t neglect YouTube, but you have to put your video where your audience will naturally find it. A lot of the time, people won’t be searching YouTube looking for your video, you have to put it where the audience you are trying to reach already views content.

You can think of video sites like you think of other kinds of media, in terms of reader or viewer demographic. Different audiences go to YouTube than go to Daily Motion. The YouTube audience has specific characteristics & the videos on YouTube tend to have specific characteristics. Short-form videos, particularly humorous ones, tend to do well on YouTube, but long-form videos don’t really belong there.

Statistics show that if you post your video to a half dozen sites other than YouTube, it increases traffic by 80 percent.

It’s also important to know your audience because that will tell you whether it is necessary for your brand to be on certain platforms, such as mobile. Video is a good way to tell your story over mobile because often people are willing to watch a short video on their phones and read the full article or press release once they are back on their computers.

A successful marketing or PR campaign involves a lot of components, and chief among them is great content. Part of that content is, obviously, text. Searchability guides much of marketing today, and properly written text means better search results.

But another key component is multimedia. Compelling product demonstrations, captivating commercials, videos that go viral . . . any of these might make or break a campaign. We at Business Wire have long been a proponent of including multimedia with a press release. We launched the Smart News Release, the first such product in the industry, in 1997. Over the past few years, we’ve uploaded more than 1,300 videos by our users onto our YouTube channel, among other popular video outlets.

Today we’ve taken yet another step, teaming with leading sales and marketing video producer MEDIAmobz to give our users access to the best in video communications for their news. Read all about the Business Wire/MEDIAmobz team-up, or check out the video below for more information.